MacOS – Icons disappearing from menu bar

macosmenu bar

I have the problem that occasionally on startup, icons are missing from the menu bar. This includes e.g. Clock, User name, Wi-Fi, Menu Meters and Notification Center.
It does not apply to e.g. Little Snitch, lastfm, Spotlight and Watts.
So it is not an issue of OS X versus other apps.

It looks like this:

enter image description here

This phenomenon appeared with Yosemite.

Best Answer

Although I do not know the problem, there are several solutions.

  1. Reboot or Log out.
  2. Kill the SystemUIServer process, either via Activity Monitor or via killall SystemUIServer. The UI server will restart and the problem will be gone. I've seen it happen that I needed to kill it twice to fully take effect.
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